Sounds almost like the title of a book.
I’m working on transitions between 1 xaml page and another in silverlight. Its wired up in c# but I want it to visually appear as though there is a transition between 1 place and another. Setting the scene, sort to speak.
In a WPF application, you can create an animation, set a trigger and watch the magic when you test the application.
In Silverlight 2 – no such thing. Instead, I believe C# is how I’ll need to make it happen. *sigh*
I’ve come to enjoy the power and ease of Blend 2. But as I become increasingly more familiar to the point of some things almost being second-nature, I begin to encounter limitations and desires for future additions.
One of such additions that I think would be beneficial would be the ability to transform items trapazoidally (is that even a word?).
It allows for rotations, parallelogram transforms, scaling in size – both decreasing and increasing and full flipping vertically and horizontally (great for creating reflections). However, faking 3D is sort of an artform that I’ve enjoyed and a lot of that has to do with changing the perspective of an object by transforming it into a trapazoid.
There are ways to accomplish this, yes, but not anywhere nearly as swiftly / easily as the other transformations available in blend (unless I’m mistaken and if I am, oh please tell me. I’ll be ever so excited to be wrong on this one).
Next week is XAML Fest, and it occured to me that I should double check to make sure that everything was set up for it on my macbook. I’d gone through several different installs of Windows 7 before everything was happy and functional and in all of that, I was a bit foggy on whether or not I’d installed everything.
So a quick check shows that I did get Blend installed, but not Visual Studio.
So its now installing. I know its a huge program but must it take this long? Ugh!
Nothing substantial to post about, I’m just impatient and blogging about the fact. Yay!
One of the really nice tools that Blend has is the ability to set an item as a color resource for later use. What this means is that I can set myself a really nice gradient or have a set of colors that I specifically need to stick to (i.e. logo or company colors) and I have those available as a nice resource tool and they’re as easy to designate (some might argue that they’re easier) than a color pallet created in Illustrator.
Well this lovely tool does have limitations where UI is coming into play.
So to describe this, I’m going to talk a bit about the details of my favorite elements (this is something that I geek out about and most step back thinking I’ve gone off the deep side in drama) – the hover, click, and go on buttons ( and objects which have been turned into “buttons” which really aren’t the standard thing that people might consider as a button ).
Something about a button that does more than just a button really gets me hyped. You hover and it looks nice, you click and it does something, and then the transition between the click and the loading of… whatever. That sort of thing really gets me hyped. I guess my girliness shines through there… shiny objects really can entertain me at times.
This is where I find the limitation though in the color resources tool!
Sometimes I’m not the most proactively organized. I’ll create my button animation effects on the fly. Sue me for not thinking it ALL the way through. Unfortunately Blend really does limit you in this.
What I’m refering to needs further example though. So lets say I’m creating a button. When my mouse hovers over the button, I want it to DO something to show me that hey, someone’s hovering over this and it has to do something more than just change the cursor to a pointed finger. So I’m working on this and I come up with this INCREDIBLE gradient that just looks amazing, but its just a bit too dramatic for this button – but I LOVE the color usage. I want it!
Well now there’s a problem. See, I want to take those settings and add them to my color resources… but wait, when I try doing this, it just adds the base color used when the button is not actively being interacted with NOT the wonderful gradient created.
…
Very irritating. I want my gradient of colors for other objects!!!
You’d think that the creation of a project in either Blend or Visual Studio, that they would start the entire solution with the same files.
Unfortunately that is not the case, and this is bad, not good.
So I’m working on a project, it has a pretty reflection on it and a main background that doesn’t take away from the elements and the bad part is I started it in Blend. So what happens when I run the silverlight application?
My SL Is in the contained box and the rest of my browser is WHITE. I can modify this by going to the debug folder, but then I can only open build from visual studio, because blend wants to rewrite the debug html file every time it loads.
This means that when I want to center the object and make the rest of the background more cohesive… ugh!
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When creating a Silverlight project in Visual Studio, it not only creates the items a bit cleaner, it also creates a seperate set of folders – inside one of these folders is a beautiful basic HTML page (and an aspx page, to use HTML, you have to right-click and tell it to be the starter page) which houses the information and is editable… and the modifications stay regardless of the application that I’m using to test!
Eeeee!
I need a “tsk tsk” bird to come out of somewhere every time I forget to start a project in Visual Studio.
I’m working on a Silverlight project and I was creating a few basic states for hovering my mouse over a button, clicking, and removing my mouse from a button.
Well it wouldn’t load!
The error that I was seeing was, “Unexpected PROPERTYELEMENT in parse rule PropertyElement ::= . PROPERTYELEMENT Content? ENDTAG..”
Uhm… What?
A google search shows a few things on Unexpected Directives but nothing that was helping me.
It said it was on line 0 character 0… that makes no sense.
However, there were 2 other errors coming up regarding fill elements. So I decided to take care of those. For some reason, Blend 2 added several Elipse.Fill elements with no properties and child Ellipse.Fill elements which also contained no properties. I cleared that up in Visual Studio, went back to Blend and Blend wanted to update like it should. Cool – well I switched back to visual studio and blend put those dang things in again! Ugh.
So I closed Blend, praying that all the work that I’d just done wasn’t going to be one of those instances where it’d take less time to recreate than to debug. I opened the project in Blend and was relieved to see now that Blend didn’t like the XAML either. Cleaned out the excess ellipse.fill elements, saved, came back to blend, told it to update and… yay! There aren’t any errors.
That lack of errors includes the strange error mentioned earlier.